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Fitness
Can top neurologist Neil Martin fight dementia with activities, wise eating?
Helga Unkeless got a flier in her mailbox this year promoting an unusual exercise program geared toward 50-plus year olds that combines physical agility with cognitive health in the fourth quarter of one’s life.
“The purpose of this gym struck me,” said Unkeless, 92, of West Hills, a retired physical therapist. “My mother and sister both died of Alzheimer’s and it petrified me. It’s important to be active.”
The gym Unkeless was talking about is Q4 Active, a fitness center in Woodland Hills that offers a 12-week cognitive conditioning camp, and a brain-body fitness program to stay mentally sharp. Its founder, renowned neurosurgeon and cognitive specialist Dr. Neil Martin, says it is driven by science, in-studio classes and at-home exercises to enhance brain performance.
Unlike the average fitness center geared to all ages, Q4 Active is designed for those whose bones are becoming more brittle and who need to concentrate on stretching, which gets the muscles moving and the oxygen in the blood flowing.
Q4 Active is the brainchild of Martin, who was at UCLA for 30 years including as chair of the Department of Neurology at the Geffen School of Medicine from 2008 to 2016. He is considered one of the leading skull base and neurovascular neurosurgeons in the country. Today he is a neurosurgeon at Pacific Neuroscience Institute and Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica.
As Q4’s chief medical advisor, he is embracing the use of advanced neuro technology to fight dementia. The program includes changing how people socialize, how they pursue lifestyle activities and how they eat — focusing on a Mediterranean-like diet emphasizing fresh fruits and vegetables.
Martin’s research is based on the world’s “blue zones” where people live longer than average, including Italy, Japan, Costa Rica and Greece — and the San Bernardino County city of Loma Linda, whose large population of Seventh-day Adventists adheres to healthy diets, socialization and exercise.
“Physical and cognitive exercise each are powerful brain enhancers,” Martin explained in November. “Combined simultaneously, they come close to a silver bullet to counteract brain aging.”
He says cognitive decline is not inevitable, and science suggests that people have the power to prevent, delay, slow and even reverse signs of cognitive decline — by learning and practicing specific brain and memory skills to enhance their brain’s health.
“We are bringing brain health to the forefront,” said Phil Swain, Q4 Active chief executive officer. “Isolation is bad for your health and 40- and 50-year-olds need to start thinking about their future brain health (now).”
One of the exercise programs puts the participants into constant movement for 45 minutes at six workout stations, with a one-minute and 30-second break during three cycles — as music plays softly in the background.
The circuit includes bouncing 4 lb. to 10 lb. balls on multicolored dots on the floor, tiptoeing through a ladder on the floor, weighted pulldowns, stretching — and smacking a sequence of lighted numbers on a wall board about 10-feet high and 20-feet wide as if they were playing the game “Whack-A-Mole.”
All of the stations address brain training, muscular strength and endurance, balance and stability, heart-rate training, mobility and flexibility and neuromotor control.
Ruth Jaco, 59, of Woodland Hills suffered from kidney and heart health issues much of her life. She has been diabetic for 20 years and took insulin for 13 years, and is also a breast cancer survivor.
But in the last 22 months, including since she joined Q4 Active in January, Jaco has lost 50-plus pounds and is off all of her medications.
“I’ve taken control of my life,” Jaco said. “I’ve changed my diet and now I’m losing one-and-one-half pounds every month. This is doable.”
Fitness
Fitness: Is mindfulness the key to a more enjoyable workout?
If exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
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There’s no shortage of rumination about why more than half of Canadians don’t meet the recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Lack of time is a common excuse, but there are plenty of busy people who exercise regularly. Access is another often-stated barrier, though most Canadians can safely exercise outdoors or in the privacy of their own home should other fitness facilities not be within an easy commute.
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What’s often ignored is the role enjoyment plays in exercise adherence. For those who revel in a tough workout, the idea some people hate to sweat may seem strange. But if exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
Once exercise becomes coupled with discomfort, getting reluctant exercisers to find pleasure and enjoyment in physical activity is an uphill battle. To help improve its appeal, researchers have been looking at the effectiveness of something called “extrinsic strategies” to promote better exercise adherence. Defined as “environmental manipulations of the exercise experience that fall outside of the FITT principles,” extrinsic strategies are more about the mental, rather than physical aspects of exercise. In short, the focus is less about the frequency, intensity, time and type of exercise, and more about the role feelings play in the adoption of a regular workout routine.
To be clear, we’re not talking about taking the effort out of exercise. Extrinsic strategies work on altering the perception of effort. Even more granular, it’s important to alter how effort is perceived during, not after, a workout. There’s a marked difference in how people feel once they wipe the sweat off their brow compared to when they’re grinding it out just hoping to finish. And while some people use the feeling of accomplishment that comes after a tough workout to motivate their return to the gym, others can’t get past the memory of how uncomfortable it felt in the moment.
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One of the extrinsic strategies to improving the exercise experience is focusing on external stimuli instead of how the body feels. Music is a popular distraction, which is why so many exercisers listen to their favourite playlists. Another option is exercising outdoors where nature works its magic at diverting exercisers from the internal sensations of effort. Exercising with a friend or within a group also helps. But contrary to using external distractions to dampen the effort of exercise, is the novel idea of leaning into how your body feels during a tough workout.
Mindfulness is defined as paying attention to what’s happening in the moment while also being open to how the body responds physically and mentally to the current experience. In other words, instead of trying to disassociate from the feelings of effort, mindfulness aims to accept and acknowledge the exertion it takes to complete a workout.
The idea that mindfulness is effective at improving exercise adherence is gaining traction, with initial studies suggesting it has merit, but mostly when exercising at lower intensities. Learning to accept and become comfortable with the feelings associated with physical exertion could be a crucial first step in finding pleasure in exercise.
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A recent study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences recently tested the effectiveness of mindfulness in enhancing the exercise experience. The goal of the research team was to see if mindfulness “could prove a useful pleasure enhancing strategy during exercise.”
A test sample of 34 recreationally active men and women were divided into two groups. One group was equipped with a recording taken from Headspace, a popular meditation and mindfulness app, that focused exercisers on tuning into their body and its movement. The control group was without any mindfulness tools.
Both sets of exercisers were asked to follow a 1.5-mile loop through a local park at a self-selected intensity they could sustain for 20-25 minutes. Heart rate was continually monitored, and study subjects were asked to check in with how they felt at two points during the walk (at 0.5 and one mile).
Results indicated listening to a mindfulness recording led to a more pleasurable exercise experience than walking the loop without. That positive response to exercise continued after the workout finished, another sign the mindfulness guided walk produced the kind of enjoyment that could encourage exercisers to walk more often.
Learning to appreciate the feelings associated with effort is an interesting strategy to introduce, especially to new exercisers who often negatively perceive the physical sensations that occur during a workout. With more practice accepting, instead of tuning out, those feelings, a greater number of novice exercisers could become more tolerant of the effort required to improve overall fitness. It’s also an interesting approach for seasoned exercisers who generally rely on disassociating from the intense feelings of a hard workout.
Acknowledging, accepting and appreciating the effort of being physically active are tools every exerciser can lean into when the going gets tough. More importantly, it could be part an improved strategy to get more Canadians enjoying the 150 minutes a week they spend working up a sweat.
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Fitness
‘WH’ Editors Put These Fitness Gifts On Their Wishlist
Jasmine Gomez is the Commerce Editor at Women’s Health, where she cover the best product recommendations across beauty, health, lifestyle, fitness, and more. When she’s not shopping for a living, she enjoys karaoke and dining out more than she cares to admit. Follow her @JazzeGomez.
Mark Stock is a food, drink, and outdoors writer from Portland, Oregon. He spent years making, selling, and sipping Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills before a full return to his journalistic roots in 2016. In addition to Men’s Health, he writes for SevenFifty Daily, Sip Northwest, The Somm Journal, The Drake, Willamette Week, Travel Oregon, and more.
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Fitness
This type of exercise suppresses hunger in women more than men, study proves
Find yourself with a bigger appetite on rest days than after logging your hardest workout of the week? Same. It usually takes me an hour or two to feel hunger after an intense session, and while there are plenty of existing studies that have attributed this to a decrease in the hunger hormone grehlin and an increase in the hormone peptide YY, which helps you feel fuller for longer, new research suggests women are more susceptible to this response than men.
Granted, the study was conducted on only a small sample of participants (eight males and six females), but this is the first review to have included women at all, and the findings were notable.
The method was pretty straightforward: participants were asked to fast overnight, before completing bouts of cycling at varying levels of intensity the next morning. These were then followed up with blood tests (to measure amounts of lactate) and self-reports to analyse appetite levels.
Results showed that the females had higher levels of total ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hunger) at baseline compared to the males, while they also had ‘significantly reduced levels’ of acylated (AG) ghrelin after intense exercise compared to males. Ghrelin levels were, in fact, much lower in both males and females after intense exercise compared to moderate exercise, meaning that all participants felt ‘less hungry’ after high-intensity exercise compared to after moderate exercise, but this was even more significant for women.
‘We found that moderate intensity exercise either did not change ghrelin levels or led to a net increase,’ the study noted. The authors added that exercise above your lactate threshold may be necessary to elicit a suppression in grehlin. Lactate threshold is the point at which lactate builds up in your bloodstream faster than your body can remove it – it occurs during high-intensity exercise.
Why is this useful to know? The author of the study, Kara Anderson, PhD, says: ‘Our research suggests that high-intensity exercise may be important for appetite suppression, which can be particularly useful as part of a weight loss programme. Exercise should be thought of as a “drug”, where the “dose” should be customised based on an individual’s personal goals.’
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Bridie is Fitness Director at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).
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